War in Pieces: AMIA and The Triple Frontier in Argentine and American Discourse on Terrorism

Resumen

July 18, 2010 marked yet another anniversary of the still unsolved terrorist attack that shook Argentina some sixteen years ago. Prior to September 11, Argentina in fact suffered two deadly terrorist attacks. The second of these, the bombing of La Asociación Mutual Israeli-Argentina (AMIA) on July 18, 1994, was the single largest attack targeting Jews since WWII and the largest terrorist attack in Latin American history. While the group “Islamic Jihad [Organization]” described by the FBI as “a covername” used by Hizbollah, claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, explanations for the AMIA bombing, in which 85 people were killed and hundreds wounded, have been wrought by contention. In this essay I examine two of the principal theories surrounding the AMIA case. The first, commonly referred to as “la historia oficial,” or “the official story,”1 posits that an Iranian-backed Hizbollah cell operating out of La Triple Frontera, the tri-border region between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, carried out the attack with help from corrupt local officials and police officers.